Voting is your right to have your views heard, to choose your Member of Parliament and have your say in how Queensland is governed.

In Queensland voting is compulsory for State and local government electoral events. You have to vote if you are:

• 18 or over
• an Australian citizen
• have lived for at least one month in a Queensland electoral district
• a British subject who is not an Australian citizen, but who was on the Commonwealth of Australia electoral roll on 25 January 1984 or the Queensland State electoral roll as at 31 December 1991.

If you do not vote, and cannot give an acceptable explanation why not, you will be fined.

Your vote does matter

When the number of votes is small, one vote can often make a world of difference. For instance, one vote:

• in 1970, in a party leadership contest, saved Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen as Premier of Queensland 
• in 1971, in a party leadership contest, lost Sir John Gorton (by his own vote) the Prime Ministership of Australia
• in 1993, not one, but two votes won Sydney the 2000 Olympic Games.

On average, 29,700 people are eligible to vote in each district at a State election. Even so, there have been several close elections.

In the 1995 State election (Queensland’s closest election ever) the Labor Party was initially returned to government by a small margin, a parliamentary majority of one seat. Labor won the last district to be decided – Mundingburra – by a mere 16 votes.

In February 1996 the Liberal Party won the court-ordered re-run of the Mundingburra election, giving 44 seats to the Coalition, 44 to the Labor Party with one Independent.